A cleareyed examination of the economic fragility of cultural institutions.
The failure of the New York City Opera stands as a cautionary tale for other performing arts companies.
Veteran Wall Street Journal opera critic Waleson (Music Criticism/San Francisco Conservatory of Music) makes her book debut with a thorough recounting of the tumultuous history of the New York City Opera, from its hopeful founding as the People’s Opera in 1943 to its sputtering demise in 2013. Championed by New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the opera was meant for audiences who could not afford the ticket prices charged by the Metropolitan Opera. Housed in a dilapidated former temple on Manhattan’s 55th Street, the NYCO rented out space to other arts companies and borrowed scenery and costumes in order to keep ticket prices low. Since opera is “the most notoriously expensive of all art forms,” the NYCO knew that it risked financial loss. Throughout its history, it scrambled for funding from foundations, philanthropists, and grants. Since it could never afford the major stars who sang at the Met, the NYCO hired beginning singers, who were grateful for employment and the chance of being discovered. By the 1960s, one performer shone: soprano Beverly Sills, who became a “repertory driver, with new operas mounted to showcase roles she wanted to sing.” In 1979, Sills took on the directorship of the NYCO. By then, she was famous, but she was hardly ready to confront the company’s severe financial deficit. Changing demographics (the company’s older audience was dying out), “threadbare artistic level” (even after a move to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center), and erratic programming reduced the number of ticket holders. Waleson documents the productions, financial struggles, changing roster of ineffectual directors, and boards comprised “of mostly well-intentioned people who were paralyzed by inertia” as forces that led the NYCO finally to declare bankruptcy. She notes with cautious optimism that festivals, art centers, and small, nimble companies—including a recently resurrected City Opera—are striving valiantly to keep opera alive.
A cleareyed examination of the economic fragility of cultural institutions.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-497-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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